Cloquet ( kloh-KAY) is a city in Carlton County, Minnesota, United States, at the junction of Interstate 35 and Minnesota State Highway 33. Part of the city lies within the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and serves as one of the reservation’s three administrative centers. The population was 12,568 at the 2020 census.

Cloquet began as a help of small settlements more or less three sawmills: Shaw Town, Nelson Town, and Johnson Town. These became known as Knife Falls after a local waterfall exceeding sharp slate rocks, and far ahead as Cloquet. The Ojibwe in the area called the area Mookomaan-onigamiing, meaning “At the Knife Portage”, as the portage to avoid Knife Falls aligned the three communities. The area was platted in 1883 and the village of Cloquet was incorporated from the three settlements in 1884. It became a city later a mayor and city council in 1904. The word “Cloquet” first appeared on an 1843 map of the Place by Joseph N. Nicollet, which named the Cloquet River, a tributary of the Saint Louis River, and the Cloquet Rapids to the north. “Cloquet” is a French surname, but historians have found no source for it. Some speculate that the river was named for the 19th-century French scientists Hippolyte and Jules Cloquet, and the harmony named for the river.

The area was the site of the 1918 Cloquet Fire, which destroyed much of the town and killed approximately 500 people.

Cloquet is famed in American economic archives because previously and after World War II it was home of the nation’s strongest consumers cooperatives. The Cloquet Coöperative Society (founded in 1910) operated two helpful stores, which handled food, hardware, shoes, dry goods, and furniture. Other cooperative services included a building supply store, a coal yard, a mortuary, an auto repair shop and a gas bolster station.